Open horizon [eyes] wide
Daniel Thompson
1
riverrun under isthmus bridge
width of hips, gibbous
moon near the end of her term,
waits to conceive
at neap tide
a week of sundays
rising; late winter/ early spring
the world turning
a turtle on an alligator’s back
what’s its smile like?
more of a grin
teeth strung with weeds and sticks
ossuary at the end of the stream
Talking rock between the stones
a bottom row of teeth
trees ranked on either side
winding a snake path
past Adam and Eve’s
leafy speafy
raft of ribs
plotting a presents’ path
snake with its tail in its mouth
Raven naming places
through the ritual
reclamation of sacred
spaces
as literal as
‘land facing the sea’
‘place of shoaling waters’
eye in the sky and one in the lake
its changing features and face
don’t change while you’re looking at them
so in a way they’re the exact same thing
me and myself (past, present and future)
old land and for all we know
we’re not alone,
that there was something here before us
before clovis, Kennewick, klee wyck feet
anticipating their long-
prolonged return
2
No Man’s Land of neither land nor sea
nor strand, coughing up islets
insular and instant
a girl down there what’s she selling?
seashells, steady supply and demand.
Through the forest is a cliff
a trip, of three sets of three times
three steps each:
all ways lead down
I set up my tripod,
feet: one in the air, one on the ground and one in the sea
Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle
Sea capital—floating city, Queen Mary
trees blown back in the shape of the wind
torn sheet written in waves
blank verse
A string along the shore—
the line spread unaccountably out,
one unit of light atop each peak
risen above the flat surface of the page
perpetually arriving,
in our ears and in our eyes
random as atoms’ stochastic dance—
binary of chance
sunset Seurat
pointillist, predictable
splitting the interval
from green to gray
a conspiracy of sight and motion (light and shade)
convene on the surface of things
disgorged into units
of one wave preceded by another;
the thing and the word
relieved of speech
as when we enter the water,
disrupting the flow of dilatory waves
that throw themselves at our feet
the waxing—
verso half of the year,
that ends where the forest begins
at the edge of a black winter festival
and the vestibule of spring
the mariner
Daniel Thompson
half moon pendant
swinging below its everpresent
morning star,
throws a net of lights across
its face, spinning yarns as long
as ocean currents,
hauled in, dripping with fish
sweat of brine
interrogation mark?
casting doubt over ocean sway
sidereal glances into the empty empyrean
everywhere a way in
ten o’clock gradient climbing towards zenith peak
midnight, resisting the whole
tug of history and tides
all shorelines are like seashells are alike
sun says ‘nothing that is known to man is unknown to me,
no foreign land’.
soul oil lighting the way
catching sleep between the swells
keeping one eye open for land
while the continents move farther apart.
Usually one can say
that the land stays in the same place
but for him, an island of a man
it’s not always that way.
Out of a desultory nod
the tide deposits him somewhere
along the new shoreline
2
life boat, fisher king, lost at sea
seaspit spindrift
run up the mast
wood creaking
like an old man
getting up from a chair
cracks in his face
beneath five days’ growth of beard
thirsty amoungst all this water
dead and don’t know it
mistaking the mountains for a cloud
the white above indistinguishable from the white below
catching up with them
the beast who drank up all the waters,
just to make sure they were caught
eye for an eye on sea or land
blinding Poseidon’s son
while he lay, sprawled, half asleep
concertina waves
crashing against the hull
in one direction to the future,
in the other to the past
brought down the fated craft
these few moments of contemplation,
their last…
Marching To the beat of ‘I’
Dan Thompson
the line already in progress
before the eye swoops, in
poised to catch
in medias res
the hand in mid-swipe
across the grid of the page
cut to lines of breath
ragged enjambment
Anticipate beats
tied in knots
of two to twelve bars each
irregular, until you step on it
dragged thru the red
mud of my drum,
rush of blood to the arm
err the rhythm automatic
and one erratic
but, not ‘I’
wetting, warm, worn harmonies (hormonies)
the split lip buzz of bees
gorged on honey blood
FISSURE
Daniel Thompson
Been out of contact for a while…
Upon re-entry of Earth’s atmosphere
I was misaligned, and almost burned up
From micro to Macro
in descending order
of magnitude upon
coming into
the world
in a moment
surgical distance from earth
squeezed between cold vacuum
and warm, bright descent
refracting solar glare in predawn haze
Momma mountains split flat face in half
eyes roll back
final rays of sunlight slide
under the knife,
across the first
few layers
of dermis.
leaning into the evening’s
leading edge
tread lightly:
the selvage of leading
lady’s evening dress
eastern night music
moon and stars
shaded down to
slow photosynthesis vibration;
silvery blades pulled out
leaving deep holes
spouting cold air
hostile to sight
blood/ oil shadows
too thick to soak up
even with Selene’s sanitary napkin
concentrated in valleys and veins
clandestine burial beneath the leaves
feedback from worlds less than a mm away
trees at the edge of the forest
waiting to be felled by an
ambuscade of winter days
feet prick green needles
anaphylactic rash
flushing endorphins into
an aquarium of awareness
proceed in predictable rhythms
decisive steps
constantly questioning one’s competence
and clarity in the dark
rote messages sent
from one sensory department to the next
which sense is most expendable
in the dark?